I was reading in Matthew 19 the other day, and I came across a confrontation Jesus had with some Pharisees. The topic at hand was divorce, which I know can be very daunting, but I want to show you an interesting thing Jesus does with these religious leaders. So, here is the text:

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

So, the Pharisees want to trap Jesus by asking him an essentially unanswerable question. (Note to church leaders and ministers…if asked this question you may want to consider what I just wrote there!) Jesus gives the standard answer, the one we all know. God’s intention is for two people to be faithfully married for a lifetime. It is interesting because I don’t know many Christian folks who would argue that marriage is a life-long commitment and that it is God’s intention that we be blessed in our marriages.

However, after Jesus gives the standard textbook answer, the Pharisees see an opportunity and throw out the name that is above every Jewish name…Moses! Then why did Moses say that we could get out of marriage?!?! And Jesus’ response also takes a page out of the story of Moses. Jesus says that Moses made an exception to God’s intent; not because God decided to be more permissive, but because of the people’s “hardness of heart.”

Hardness of Heart…Moses…where have I seen this image before? Wait, is Jesus comparing the people of God with the Pharaoh of Egypt? Pharaoh who had the hard heart and would let God bless his people and act on their behalf. Does this same condition exist among God’s people? It wasn’t a one time thing? Pharaoh destroyed his whole people with his hardness of heart, I wonder what we destroy with ours…

You see, God wants tender hearts. Marriage is a good example of a prime arena that this needs to be lived out because there are very, very few who enter into their marriage commitment without tender hearts. Yet, over time and life experience, and other factors…our hearts can turn hard against our spouses. The same could be said of our relationship with God. This is a lesson that the Pharisees refused to learn as we read through the pages of the Gospel stories. There hardness became the very core of there teachings and communal interactions. Yet for us, in our marriages, we need to stay tender toward one another and not be a closed off, hard-hearted…stubborn and self-focused. In our relationship with God, we also need to be tender so that God can do his work in us. To harden a heart is to be closed off to the movement, work, and will of God—it is to lose God’s intention.

I love how Jesus uses the story of Exodus to combat the Pharisees here, but the image is terrifying in that divorce which continues to be commonly practiced is more a condition of the heart, and less an intention of our God. But before we think that divorced people are the only hard-hearted folks, don’t lose the overall principle while pointing at the specific people! (And look at the passage that follows…understand the seriousness this discussion aroused in the disciples)